Hoffman polynomials of nonnegative irreducible matrices and strongly connected digraphs
✍ Scribed by Yaokun Wu; Aiping Deng
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2006
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 367 KB
- Volume
- 414
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0024-3795
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
For a nonnegative n × n matrix A, we find that there is a polynomial f (x) ∈ R[x] such that f (A) is a positive matrix of rank one if and only if A is irreducible. Furthermore, we show that the lowest degree such polynomial f (x) with trf (A) = n is unique. Thus, generalizing the well-known definition of the Hoffman polynomial of a strongly connected regular digraph, for any irreducible nonnegative n × n matrix A, we are led to define its Hoffman polynomial to be the polynomial f (x) of minimum degree satisfying that f (A) is positive and has rank 1 and trace n. The Hoffman polynomial of a strongly connected digraph is defined to be the Hoffman polynomial of its adjacency matrix. We collect in this paper some basic results and open problems related to the concept of Hoffman polynomials.